The company, however, has long said that it wanted Azure to reach an annual run rate of $20 billion by the end of its 2018 fiscal year. Azure gross margins were a "key component" of the 8 percentage point improvement in commercial cloud services from the same period previous year, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said. Here, the company reported revenues of 6.9 billion for its Intelligent Cloud business units, which include server products and cloud services.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) FQ1 2018 earnings were released after closing bell tonight, and the company posted earnings of 84 cents per share, a 17% increase from last year, on $24.5 billion in sales, a 12% year-over-year increase. This is significant because the company exceeded this market cap again recently, which is a number that the software giant has not seen since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000.

Microsoft's cloud business - which includes products such as Office 365, Dynamic 365 and the flagship Azure computing platform - is a major growth driver. Surface revenue gained 12%, helped by sales of the new Surface Laptop. Office consumer products increased by 12 percent and Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to 28 million. Windows consumer revenue increased by 4 percent, which is ahead of the overall personal computer market.

More Personal Computing: This segment, which includes results for Windows licensing and devices (Surface, phones, and Xbox), was flat at $9.4 billion. Search acquisition costs jumped 15 percent.

Judge worries about Trump impact in Bergdahl case
The judge will hear testimonies from soldiers who were injured as they searched for Bergdahl after he went missing. Instead, the words "recognize that [the comments] were made and that people had heard them", he said.

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn, the professional social network, in December for $27 billion, in part, to boost the Dynamics business.

Surface revenue finally saw some growth, as it had been declining for a while due to the lack of new hardware. Credit Suisse analysts Michael Nemeroff, Alexander Hu and Christopher Rochester weighed in with a statement showing expectations of strength in its commercial cloud business. The KeyBanc analysts had expected a 1 percent decline.

The technology giant's net income rose to US$6.58b in the first quarter, from US$5.67b a year earlier.

Kellogg's Apologizes for Racist Corn Pops Box
Writer Saladin Ahmed tweeted images of the artwork on a Corn Pops box after he noticed something odd about the illustration. Do Corn Pops have a race? Ahmed's tweets motivated all kinds of other Corn Pops-related inquiries and also debates.